The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Image via Wikipedia

As Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson made the PR rounds everywhere from 60 Minutes to the Daily Show, the terribleness of Jobs' too-early death has come into focus: that Jobs evaded conventional medicine when his tumor first appeared, may have died as a result, and regretted it.

"I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking,” Isaacson told 60 Minutes. “We talked about this a lot. He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."

It’s not just that Jobs’ refusal of treatment is “crazy,” as former Intel chief Andy Grove put it to Isaacson. This tragedy sprung from the very thing that made him so great: his unwillingness to believe that technology needed to be clumsy, ugly, or difficult. In consumer products, this led to the MacIntosh and the iPhone. In animation, it created the Pixar canon. But biology and medicine are messy, and demanding a magic solution doesn't always produce one.

There's more here than just the simple lesson that people with cancer should listen to their doctors about getting their tumor cut out, or that you can't cure cancer with diet or acupuncture, as Jobs apparently hoped he could. The kind of innovation Steve Jobs practiced, probably the type of innovation we mythologize and lionize most since personal computers started changing the fabric of society three decades ago, does not and has not translated to medicine in the same way.

To some extent, everything that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and the folks at Google have done to change our world springs from a single innovation: the creation of the microprocessor in the early 1970s. Every computer technology has sprung from this fundamental innovation. If we really want to talk about the biggest heroes of the digital age, we should always be starting with Robert Noyce, the Intel co-founder, or Jack Kilby, the physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his transistor work.

But we don't. Neither of those men ever bonded with the larger public the way Jobs did. And that's because Jobs (like Gates, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, really), was solving a different kind of problem: how to make a powerful new technology useable to people. And Jobs, with an artist's vision, went a step further: he made it perfect. Like Ferdinand Porsche building cars, he made the mundane beautiful, building technological gadgets in which people could see themselves.

Certainly, hospitals could use the Jobs touch. In a stunning eulogy, Jobs' sister Mona Simpson recounted how an intubated Jobs asked for a sketchpad in the ICU. "He designed new fluid monitors and x-ray equipment," she said. "He redrew that not-quite-special-enough hospital unit. And every time his wife walked into the room, I watched his smile remake itself on his face."